The Coconut Nuts

This is a long overdue post.

Many people visit marketmanila.com for recipes, reviews, and many other finds. One day last June, I went to the site and found a long-lost friend instead.

Marketman had just come from the anniversary of Salcedo Market, and one of his purchases was a painting of a sea turtle on a coconut shell. He said that it came from a small enterprise called Nut Art, ran by the Mindoro-based husband and wife team of Michael and Bernadette.


My heart leapt. Bernie was my classmate at the UP College of Fine Arts – a good friend I have not seen since we graduated.

Then I kicked myself. Because I, too, was at Salcedo Market that day. But I was too busy buying native snacks and other goodies that I totally missed out on the art exhibit – and a chance to reconnect with the past.

I did find her a few hours later, after she replied to an email I quickly sent her from an address provided by Marketman.

We burned the cables to catch up with our lives. After working with a puppet company, teaching at the Phil. High School for the Arts and illustrating children's books, Bernie Solina (Pinky to her family) moved to Mindoro with her husband Michael, a retired telecommunications engineer. They have since opened View Point House–
their lovely home built my Michael, to tourists who opt for a guest-with-host arrangement.
This concept is prevalent in Europe, and while their home is far from the beaches, they have a breathtaking view of the mountains and the vast sea that surrounds the island.
Together they nurture a spacious garden filled with herbs, flowering plants, fruit trees, fluttering butterflies and most naturally, coconuts.

It takes a creative and proactive couple to find yet another use for the versatile tropical wonder. According to Bernie, "The concept of Nut Art came one fine morning during breakfast. It began with the topic of making charcoal out of the empty coconut shells left from the previous copra making days. We have more then 30 coconut trees in our garden so besides using the nuts for buko we also make the rest into copra (dried coconut meat). The leftovers from copra-making are the coconut shells which are usually made into charcoal (coconut charcoal is so clean and pure so it is used for many filter applications)."
Bernie further states, "NutArt (pagpinta sa bao) is a milestone in our relationship kasi collaborative. He did the product development or concept of it– from how the shell is cleaned, primed, mounted, packaged and even displayed. Not to mention, its documentation, coding and pricing. All I do is the painting and the (more or less) arguing with him what I want to paint (Ha-ha!). We have been at it for a little more than a year now."

The coconut sure goes a long, long way. Exactly how far? Bernie shares, "We help three young people go through high school and one through AMA in Calapan right now. And for their additional allowance, they help us maintain our garden and house during the weekends. You know now where our NutArt earnings go."
No wonder this couple has gone loco over coco... in their beautiful home on the hills of an island south of Manila.
For more information on Nutart, please visit http://nutart.blogspot.com